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Before Upgrading To WordPress 5.6 Do This So Your Site Doesn’t Break

5.6 Is Here But Will It Break Your Site?

Just in time for the holidays WordPress releases version 5.6 named “Simone” to the public. With it comes a few exciting new changes including the new Twenty Twenty One theme. The new theme seems to be following the trend of muted pastel colors that is growing rapidly in popularity. Along with this update is some upgrades to the block system in the Gutenberg editor and some other updates you can read here on the WordPress Site.  

different colors of twenty twenty one theme
Different presets for WordPress’s Twenty Twenty One theme

Before smashing that Update Button…

Just like with version 5.5 there are some jQuery updates in the version which was planned over three updates 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7. They have release a plugin to test your compatibility with 5.6 which you can install and run prior to making the major update.  The test plugin can be found here:  Test jQuery Updates Plugin.

With the update to WordPress 5.5, a migration tool known as jQuery-migrate was no longer enabled by default. This may lead to lacking functionality or unexpected behavior in some themes or plugins that run older code.

The Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin serves as a temporary solution, enabling the migration script for your site to give your plugin and theme authors some more time to update, and test, their code. With the update to WordPress 5.6, the included version of jQuery is also upgraded. This means that old code that previously caused warnings now may instead may cause errors or stop working entirely.

Twenty Twenty One Theme
Twenty Twenty One Theme

Not Sure If You Should Upgrade?

Not to worry, Help 4 WordPress has got your back. As experts in WordPress, we are here to help you. You might only need our help one time or you can have us on call 24 hours a day with one of our memberships. You can even choose us to host your WordPress site and then you will know it is optimized to run its fastest.